Monday, October 14. 2013

The first was on some research into prediction of people's actions from social media data. Social Media marketing company iProspect worked witrh Cambridge University to do a piece of research on the impact of Facebook Likes. They created a fake brand on Facebook (so hopefully no existing influence to skew results). They kept everything else the same, but varied the number of "likes" on the site and then tested it on a large sample (mechanical turk uers, as it happens) an A/B/C testing to see how it affects people's reaction.

The results were that:

1. Number of Likes matter (Especially in the absence of any other validation, as - Benjamin Ellis noted)
2. There is a measurable spectrum of intent from trust to intent to buy as likes increase, but the trend tails off as the numbers increase
3. The view is that there is an influence from seeing what others do similar to the "Crowded restaurant effect", people feel comfortable liking what they see other people like
4. Heavy Facebook users are more influenced by the no of Likes than less heacy ones, ie those "bought into" Facebook buy into Likes as a validation measure
5. Women have both higher recall, and propensity to like, Facebook Likes

The "Tipping point" at which extra likes started to have minimal extra impact was c 100,000 likes. They could not predict how many likes were required to tip someone from trust into buying, but they do still think differing likes are needed to kick off different actions.

Its was good to see this reserach with hard data, though to be fair its what all of us believed was the case. Many Companies are already buying Likes, but are finding its just a chip to enter the game and are now trying to get to engagement (buying 100,00 Likes from a Like Farm in the Far East not being exactly conducive to gaining interactive fans).

There was a good question asked, - ie is it best to curate rather than create. Having 2.8 million likes is all very well, but if I but can't see what people like me actually like, how compelling is it?

Then came Adrian Cheok (@adriancheok), Professor of Pervasive Computing at City University London gave us a presentation on multisensory human communication.

In essence he argues that we read 2x more information from nonverbal communication than verbal, so there will be strong pressure (and big benefits?) to move from information to experience communication, and staring at screens is a trammnsient thing. Sound was the first augmented reality (he showed an all tha made katana noises when you wave your umbrell around), but in his view the endgame is to transmit touch and smell/taste:

Touch - Prof Cheok showed devices that can transmit touch over the internet to other devices, including the very icky "Kissinger" (to tranmit kisses), and a set of rings that transmit touch between couples who are separated

Smell and Taste - the issue is you need to stimulate correct parts of limbic system, but it's a chemical not electrical stimulation. So far the stats of the art is small chemical pods that can exude specific smells to command, some so sall they can fit on glasses. The real breakthrough though will be to generate smell/taste via electromagnetic signals.

Three things from this were obvious to me:

- Firstly, that one to one is not the business model, but One to Many. When I saked Prof Cheok, he did admit hat oe use case was for fans to buy devices attached to celebrities they like and get touchy messages from their chosen slebs.

- Second, the real game will be bot to human, mand I predict tHe Turing Touch Test

- Thirdly, as with many things on the internet, Sex will drive this area's early, er, rise.

This is not new by the way, I recall my friend Dave Bamford doing tranmission of touch this for his MS at NYU over 10 years ago, but the bandwidth has rocketed, and costs and size of sensors and servo equipment has plummeted in a mere decade (this is also what is driving the overall robotics revolution)

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